The next free concert presented by the Santa Barbara Music Club will take place at 3 p.m. Saturday in the familiar, acoustically vibrant Faulkner Gallery in the downtown Santa Barbara Public Library.
Music Club president Eric Valinsky is both a composer and a virtuoso pianist (not to mention a specialist in computer systems architecture), and the afternoon’s music will commence with Valinsky serving in both capacities, performing his own Diamond Sonata, followed by UCSB doctoral candidate and pianist Leslie Cain playing Wolfgang Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-Minor, K 457 (1784) and Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 8, S.244/8, in F#-Minor (1847).
Valinsky wrote his Diamond Sonata for dancer and choreographer Carrie Diamond (hence the name). The work takes the form of a sometimes heated argument with Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 10 in C-Major, K. 330 (1783), a work the composer both loves and distrusts.
He says of his sonata: “This was a period of my life in which I was discovering the riches of 20th century ballet music, particularly of Stravinsky. I admired Pulcinella and Le baiser de la fée, and I wondered whether the technique of modernizing an earlier work could be applied in the stern deconstructive environment of the late ’70s. I realized that this could be my way of reconciling with K. 330 and I composed a stark, minimalistic deconstructed paraphrase of the piece. During the subsequent decades, I revised the sonata twice, each time getting to love the original work more and incorporating more of its elegance.”
Since little need be said by way of introduction to either the Mozart or the Liszt, a few words more about Cain would not be out of place. Cain holds two undergraduate degrees, one in piano from the Manhattan School of Music and one in philosophy from Cal State-Los Angeles. She performed at the 2016 “Ecole d’Art Américaines” summer music festival at the Chateau de Fontainebleau in France and at the Appaloosa Festival in Front Royal, Va.
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— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.